Have you ever stopped and listened to the background sounds in a room you are in? The hum of the ventilation? The buzz of the electricity? While most of the time we are barely aware of these sounds, Arthur Jinyue Guo, a researcher at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Rhythm, Time and Motion, has revealed that they nevertheless affect our behavior.
"There seems to be more in this than what most of us are aware of," he says.
Guo recently came across what may be a fascinating example as his colleague, music professor David Loberg Code, came to Norway to work. Back home in Michigan, Code has a very strong sense of absolute pitch: He can usually identify the name of a pitch - and sing a given pitch - quite quickly and without external assistance.
While coming to Norway, Code realized that his absolute pitch was a lower than usual. It was, suddenly, unreliable.
For the music researchers at RITMO, including Code himself, it became a puzzle: Why was this happening? Could there be something different about indoor environments in Europe?
